This story was originally published on November 15, 2006.

Tonight, when you crawl into bed, weary from another day of toil, stop for a moment.

Throw back the covers, kneel at your bedside, cup your hands in prayer and say eight words from the heart:

"Thanks, Lord, for not making me a Buckeye."

Scientists are pondering how Ohio could have screwed up Lake Erie — again. They've found new dead zones, which I thought referred to Cleveland night life, but actually are areas of the lake where oxygen is getting depleted and bad algae run amok, sorta like former Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett on a Saturday night.

Ohioans have a little trouble with counting. When they celebrated the centennial of Ohio's statehood, they did it twice. Some mouth-breathers counted the creation of the Northwest Territory in 1788 as the start of Ohio. Uhhh, no. Try 1803, when, you know, Ohio was granted statehood.

A few years later, we Michiganders had a little bizarre skirmish with the Ohioans over some swampy land at our southeast corner. It looked like war until President Andrew Jackson settled things in 1833 by giving the land to Ohio and consoling us with the Upper Peninsula. That swamp became the dumpy factory town now known as Toledo. Tahquamenon, Toledo. Fair trade? Yeppers.

Recently, I learned that Ohio State fans acknowledge one another this way: One will say "O-H" and the other will respond "I-O." Brilliant. Maybe they'll someday be able to move to full words, and instead of recognizing Ohio University, say "Ohio" and "State" to one another.

Then there's Cornhole. The game is as stupid as its name. It started down in the Cincinnati area and has grown a bit in popularity. Not too many folks 'round here are familiar, so I'll explain. You "huck" a small bag of corn at a wooden platform, horseshoe-style, and if you land it on the platform you get a point. Put it through a round hole in the platform, though, and you get three points and everyone shouts "Cornhole!"

Can't you just feel the excitement?

I did some research, and I guess Ohio means something like "big burning river," and the state motto is something like "With God, we can imagine we live in Michigan."

Robert Warner(Photo: Battle Creek Enquirer)

I also found out that they can't cut straight down there. The state flag is a mess of crazy zig-zags. It looks like the flag of a steamship line, not a state.

They have a lot of official things, including an official state beverage, tomato juice — no kidding. I believe the state fossil is Woody Hayes, and the state reptile is Bobby Knight, who played basketball at Ohio State.

The state tree, of course, is the buckeye tree. I looked up some information about old Aesculus glabra. It turns out its fruit — named by Native Americans because, when opened, it looks like the eye of a buck deer — is widely known as the "stinking buckeye." I do not wonder why. The tree's wood used to be used for caskets. Again, I don't wonder why.

Turns out Ohioan William Henry Harrison's presidential campaign brought the buckeye to prominence. He used a log cabin decked out in raccoon skins and buckeye fruit as his symbol. He won the election, died 32 days after his inauguration and left a legacy: All Ohioans became known as Buckeyes.

So never mind that they're all nuts. No matter what happens Saturday afternoon, we'll still be up here, and they'll still be down there.